Chapter 23 #3
She stepped farther into the room and took the roll from the shelf behind him.
For one moment they stood near. Not touching.
Not even close enough to invite comment, had anyone looked in.
Yet near enough that Thomas could smell lavender and ink and the faint smoke that clung to her gown.
Near enough to see the tiny fleck of green in her left eye that was darker than the rest.
Her hand brushed the edge of the table. His did not move. Neither did hers.
Then she gathered the roll to her chest and stepped back.
“My lord,” she said, soft but no longer cold.
The title was still a wall, but now there was a hand pressed to the other side of it.
Thomas inclined his head. “Mistress Quinn.”
Her mouth curved, barely. Then she went back to the hall.
Thomas remained in the account chamber until Walter called his name twice and Hob appeared in the doorway with an expression of weary resignation.
“You hiding?” Hob asked.
“No.”
“Brooding?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll want to tell your face.”
Thomas reached for the cup someone had left on the table. It held cold small beer. He drank deeply.
Hob came in and leaned one shoulder against the wall.
He was dressed for the yard, leather jerkin scuffed, sleeves pushed back over forearms roped with age and use, his beard damp from the mist. There was a streak of something on his tunic that might have been mud, grease, or supper. With Hob, the possibilities were broad.
“He’ll not leave it,” Hob said.
“No.”
“What will he do?”
Thomas looked toward the hall, where Amelia’s voice rose with Walter’s, calm and maddeningly reasonable.
“A weapon,” he said.
Hob followed his gaze. “Aye.”
“Belmaine’s coffers run deep for a man living on honest rents.”
Hob grunted. “Honest rents rarely buy fur-lined gloves.”
“Or three extra men on the road.”
“Or a gelding that eats better than half the parish.”
Thomas rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “He sits too near the old road.”
“Pershore to Worcester,” Hob said. “North for those with reason to ride that way. Merchants, clerks, lordlings with too much baggage, messengers who think their seals make them immune to mud.”
“Great folk pass in autumn from feast to feast,” Thomas said. “And Belmaine has men enough to watch what goes by.”
“Or take toll where none is owed.”
“Mayhap.” Thomas stared down into the cup. “Mayhap worse. But unless the king himself chooses to look kindly on Ashcombe, none of it helps us.”
“The king himself is not in the habit of looking kindly on men who followed Montfort.”
“No.”
“Queen’s folk, mayhap,” Hob said slowly. “They travel too.”
Thomas looked at him.
Hob shrugged. “I listen when Friar Huck drinks.”
Despite the weight pressing down on him, Thomas almost smiled.
From the hall, Edith’s voice cut through a rising quarrel near the hearth.
“If that crust hits the floor, Wat, I’ll feed it to you with the rushes still on it.”
Thomas looked toward the doorway.
Across the hall, Amelia sat at the table again, head bent over a linen inventory. The window light touched her cheek, her freckles, the smooth line of her covered hair. She didn’t look up, but her quill had stopped moving.
Thomas’s eyes narrowed.
Hob saw it. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That woman’s quill stopping is never nothing.”
Thomas looked at him.
Hob lifted both hands. “I’m old, not blind.”
“You are not old.”
“I am old enough to know when a woman is listening.”
Thomas looked back.
Amelia dipped the quill, wrote nothing, and then very carefully wrote something on a scrap of parchment that had not been there a moment before.
A small, dangerous sensation moved through Thomas.
Hope, mayhap. Or terror. With Amelia, the two had begun traveling in company.
Hob’s beard twitched. “There she is.”
“Do not sound pleased.”
“I’m not pleased. I’m entertained.”
“That is worse.”
“Aye.”
Thomas watched Amelia fold one hand over the scrap as Alyson wandered too close with her half-peeled apple and too many questions in her eyes.
He could not hear what the child asked, but Amelia’s answer carried back, light and quick.
“Nothing. A very dull linen matter.”
Alyson looked unconvinced. She had learned suspicion from the best people in the house and wielded it with terrible confidence.
“Does linen make you laugh?” Alyson asked.
“Only when it’s badly managed.”
Alyson considered this, accepted it with the solemnity of a judge who had heard stranger testimony, and returned to arguing with Wat over the ownership of a burnt crust.
Hob made a soft sound.
Thomas looked at him. “What?”
“You have no plan.”
“I said so.”
Hob nodded toward the hall. “She does.”
Thomas looked at Amelia.
She sat in her ugly grey gown with her perfect wimple and her careful distance, writing on the back of a linen inventory as if the fate of Ashcombe could be settled between sheets, towels, and whatever Edith called those square cloths that appeared everywhere and were never where anyone needed them.
Thomas had refused to send her away, had refused Belmaine’s bargain.
He had chosen to try to save the land and the woman both. Now he only had to work out how to do the impossible before Belmaine found a weapon sharp enough to make the choice for him.